[badgersnake]

There’s no reason to lock tourists up. If you don’t want them put them on the first flight back. Locking people up is expensive and if they’re willing to leave anyway, totally pointless.

You would think that a country with a whole department devoted to government efficiency could work that out.

[ta1243]

10 nights in an ICE jail is very lucrative to the company that runs that jail. Can be funded by the taxes the poorest in America pay.

[exe34]

I'm surprised they don't require the victim or their family to pay to have them released. Make Piracy/Kidnapping Great Again.

[rqtwteye]

There are places where you get charged something like $60 for a day in prison.

[johnnyanmac]

damn, 1800 a month? What am I doing paying rent? /s

[ornornor]

Aren’t a lot of jails private and for profit? Just bill the tourist for the stay and detain until they pay in full (accruing even more debt in the meantime). It makes perfect business sense which is all that seems to matter to the US nowadays.

[potato3732842]

>Aren’t a lot of jails private and for profit?

No, it's a small-ish minority of them. Most are government owned and run.

That said, there's a huge incentive to piss away money holding people so you can justify your budget and use poor conditions to justify increases in budget. And on top of that the contractors that supply government jails are pretty evil too.

So it's really a distinction without a difference at the end of the day, it's all a pretty rotten system.

[johnnyanmac]

ICE sure isn't. That is tax payer money at work, sadly.

But yes, there are incentives that do reward cells and even individuals for number of imprisonments. And no, they do not check nor punish "administrative errors".

[sillywalk]

> ICE sure isn't. That is tax payer money at work, sadly.

Taxpayers are paying the private companies, but they're very much for profit.

About that:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/01/29/billi...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/private-prison-...

https://afsc.org/newsroom/ice-signs-massive-contract-profit-...

[account42]

There's no reason to lock criminals up. If you don't want them doing crimes send them home. Locking people up is expensive and if they are willing to stop being bad, totally pointless.

Or maybe in both cases the point is deterrence.

[johnnyanmac]

>There’s no reason to lock tourists up.

As has been a rising sentiment as of late: "The cruelty is the point"

You're right that it isn't efficient in any sense. But the kinds of people who go into and are chosen for "law enforcement" tend to be the very people that should never be given a weapon. It's just a large scale Stanford Experiment in that regard.